During the 10-year period, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded in physics in the United States increased by 58 percent. But the number of bachelor’s degrees in physics awarded to African American rose only slightly.
Christina H. Paxson, president of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, recently released a draft report that outlines a concrete set of actions to promote diversity and inclusion and confront the issues of racism, power, privilege, inequity, and injustice.
Of the 304,467 American students studying abroad in all areas of the globe, about 5.6 percent, are African Americans. A decade ago African Americans were 3.4 percent of all U.S. college students who studied abroad. More than 13,000 U.S. college students studied at universities in sub-Saharan Africa in the 2013-14 period.
In 2014, there 5,479 hate crime incidents reported to the federal agency by local law enforcement agencies. But less than 11 percent of all local agencies reported any hate crimes. There was only one reported hate crime in the entire state of Mississippi.
The Ku Klux Klan reemerged in the early part of the twentieth century. At its height in the 1920s, there were more than 2,000 local chapters of the Klan with as many as 8 million members. A new project documents the spread of the Klan across the United States.
The president of Drake State Community and Technical College in Huntsville was placed on leave and Dr. Kemba Chambers, who has been serving as dean of mathematics, natural sciences, and pre-engineering at Calhoun Community College in Tanner, Alabama, was named acting president.
Professor Warren joined the faculty at Virginia Tech in 1989. He was a recognized as an expert on corn and sorghum diseases and developed plants that were resistance to disease.
The attack on the Lewis & Clark campus in Portland, Oregon, came days after several racist statements threatening Black students appeared on the social media app Yik-Yak. One post stated, “I just want to hang you ignorant Black people.”
From time to time, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education will provide links to online articles that may be of interest to our readers. Here are this week’s selections.
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education regularly publishes a list of new books that may be of interest to our readers. Here are the latest selections.
The students say that the seal, depicting three bushels of wheat, is an image taken from the family seal of Isaac Royall Jr. who donated his estate to endow the first professorship in law at Harvard. Royall owned slaves and was a slave trader.
The statue of abolitionist Frederick Douglass is eight-feet tall and is mounted on a three-foot tall base. It weighs about 1,000 pounds. The statue was designed in Ireland and cast in bronze in Wales.
Richard Edwards, chancellor of the flagship campus of Rutgers University in New Brunswick, announced that in conjunction with the 250th anniversary of the educational institution’s founding, the university has formed a “Committee on Enslaved and Disenfranchised Populations in Rutgers History.”
Stephen C. Rose, a graduate of Harvard University, committed suicide at the age of 29. Now his family and friends have established a nonprofit organization for programs to provide mental health services for college students of color. The latest effort is a new text-messaging counseling service, scheduled to debut this coming winter.
The new center will offer on-site tutoring services, academic advising, and mental health counseling. It also will serve as a community gathering place for Black students.
Here is this week’s news of grants to historically Black colleges and universities or for programs of particular interest to African Americans in higher education.
Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., has announced that it is changing the names of two buildings on campus. Mulledy Hall and McSherry Hall were both named after former presidents of the university who had participated in the slave trade.
New data on graduation rates from the U.S. Department of Education shows that in a group of the nation’s largest universities, the Black student graduation rate of 46 percent is 21 percentage points lower than the rate for White students. This gap has existed for a quarter century.
The board of trustees of Eureka College in Illinois has named Jamel Santa Cruze Bell as interim president of the educational institution, effective July 1, 2016. She currently serves as vice president for strategic and diversity initiatives.
Blacks in the United States are more likely to move than whites. In the 2014-to-2015 period, almost 6 million African Americans, nearly 15 percent of the entire Black population of the United States changed their residence. But for highly educated Blacks and Whites, the racial mobility gap no longer exists.
Yale University President Peter Salovey has announced a series of new initiatives aimed at producing “a better, more diverse, and more inclusive Yale.” A new academic center, increased student financial aid, a doubling of the budget for the Afro-American Cultural Center, and enhanced diversity training are among the initiatives.
In the 2013-14 academic year, there were 31,113 students from sub-Saharan Africa enrolled at colleges and universities in the United States. They made up 3.5 percent of the 886,052 foreign students at U.S. colleges and universities.
Dr. Taylor has been serving as dean and professor in the College of Education at Bowie State University in Maryland. Earlier in her career, she was associate dean in the School of Education and Human Services at the University of Michigan-Flint.
The Association of Public Land-grant Universities is a research, policy, and advocacy organization representing 238 public research universities and land-grant institutions. Dr. Gray-Little has been chancellor of the University of Kansas since 2009.
Earlier this month, Paine College in Augusta, Georgia, announced that it was unable to pay its faculty and employees as scheduled. But employees did receive their paychecks within a week. Now the college has announced a new emergency fundraising effort and plans to trim its expenses.
Gwendolyn Williams is joining the faculty at Elizabeth City State University in North Carolina. Nzingha Dalila was appointed to the faculty at the Clermont campus of the University of Cincinnati and Jim C. Harper II of North Carolina Central University was elected vice president of programs for the Association for the Study of African American Life and History.
In June 2014, Wilberforce University was issued a “show-cause order” by its accrediting agency that required the HBCU to present its case as to why its accreditation should not be withdrawn. That order has now been lifted.
Taking on new roles are Katherine Bassard at Virginia Commonwealth University, Vita C. Pickrum at Delaware State University, Adam A. Smith at the University of Alabama, Pamela A. Anthony at Southern Methodist University, Constance Mallette at Winston-Salem State University, and Ivan L. Harrell II at Georgia Piedmont Technical College.
An energy company initially had pledged to transfer ownership of an old distillery building and four acres of land to Simmons College as part of the deal to win approval of the project from the city of Louisville. The college had planned to convert the abandoned building into student housing.
It comes as no surprise that in the aftermath of campus protests on issues dealing with race, there has been a backlash, with several race-related incidents occurring on campuses across the nation.
Ta-Nehisi Coates won the National Book Award in the nonfiction category. He has taught at MIT and the City University of New York. Robin Coste Lewis, a Provost’s Fellow in the creative writing and literature doctoral program at the University of Southern California, won the National Book Award in the poetry category.
From time to time, The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education will provide links to online articles that may be of interest to our readers. Here are this week’s selections.
The website, entitled “A Shaky Truce: Starkville Civil Rights Struggles, 1960-1980,” includes oral history interviews, photographs, and documents on the history of the university and the city, school desegregation, and the civil rights movement.
The Journal of Blacks in Higher Education regularly publishes a list of new books that may be of interest to our readers. Here are the latest selections.
The University of Southern California in Los Angeles received a donation of $10 million from the George Lucas Family Foundation. The money will provide scholarships for students in the School of Cinematic Arts with preferences given to African American and Hispanic students.
Carolyn R. Hodges, vice provost and dean of the Graduate School at the University of Tennessee, will return to her faculty post and Mary H. Gresham, vice provost for educational collaboration and engagement at the University at Buffalo, is retiring at the end of the year.
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